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  No. He did not think humans would ever have done that.

  You could not trust everything the Aspects said. They were repeating history they had heard and that could be wrong. Or they could lie.

  “Don’t worry ’bout that. Just go get something to eat. And watch yourself in the tunnels out there, huh? Could be mechs still hidin’.”

  Toby’s frown vanished in a glimmering. As the boy went out of the control room Killeen could see him cast his questions aside and take up again the eagerness of the hunt. He would find the manmech and together they would prowl the corridors. Through the complicated scheme of the ship would resound distant enthusiastic barking, glad cries, and the hot energy of pursuit. Something in him looked forward to that, for reasons he could not name.

  Snowglade was a brown, rutted ball.

  That shocked them, even though they had fled and fought over innumerable broad wasted plains of it. Among the Families there had always been the long-held memory of old Snowglade: of great lakes shimmering blue, of green glades, of moist high valleys warmed by Denix radiance.

  The globe that swam in the view-wall was a dried husk. Not the ample fruit which the Aspects remembered and spoke of recovering. Snowglade was the pit of that fruit, now eaten. The mechs had buried its ice, cooled its plains, smothered its brimming life in dust and desecration.

  Mechworks dotted the night side of Snowglade with their pale, blue glow. Traceries looped and cut the night with amber, ruby, burnt yellow. It was their world now.

  Killeen listened to the startled exclamations as the people passed through the big control bay. They took a while to understand what they saw and the ideas did not come easily.

  Once they did, there was always a moment of indrawn breath, of amazement at the scale of what they witnessed and what it meant. Snowglade was a blasted ruin. The fabled green paradise of their forefathers was lost.

  He remembered Toby when he had been the merest infant. If you let him go for a second, or even partially subtracted some of his support, the small brown thing would quickly respond. His arms would reach out to grab, his hands clench. Even his feet would seek purchase and his toes would grasp.

  The Arthur Aspect had told Killeen that this was an instinctive response. If matters of gravity changed, if support failed, the young sought to grab their parent and hold on. The baby did not know it did it. It simply did.

  Killeen wondered if they were doing that now. Reaching out from the dead parent planet. Grasping, even as they said farewell.

  Life carrying out impulses implanted in the very way the world worked. Not following a program of its own, but a design won from experience itself, from being immersed in the world and inseparable from it.

  Grasping for something it did not fathom.

  Shibo had stayed with the ship system until her eyelids drooped, her exskell whined, her hands strayed randomly. Then she slept.

  When she awoke, Snowglade was a dwindling dry mote. The Families were securing the ship by hook and by crook, figuring the works of it. This was the first technology they had ever seen designed for human use. Tinkering with it, solving puzzles no more complex than a doorknob, opened long-dormant ways of thinking, avenues sealed by the ancient identification of machines with mechs and mechs with death.

  Killeen took courage from this. If they could master this ship they had a chance. Not a good chance, perhaps, given what might lurk up here in the swallowing black. But it was a beginning. And they had faced hard nights before.

  Shibo told him what she had learned of their course. “Outward from the Center, that much I see. Winds of matter blow here. We catch some that. Don’t know how but the ship does. So we go out.”

  It was enough for the moment to know that the Mantis had not placed them on some deadly path. There was time enough to learn more and in that could lie their future.

  “We can’t take everything the Mantis did as wrong,” he said to Shibo and Cermo when they all met before the view-wall. “It might have sent us somewhere useful.”

  “Glad we killed it,” Cermo-the-Slow said, his face twisted up in distaste. “The Fanny-thing…”

  Killeen nodded. “It did not know human dignity. How could it?”

  Cermo shook his head. “Should’ve.”

  “When you back us down and we haven’t got anything left, you can’t take our dignity,” Killeen said. “We’ll die for it. Kill for it. Hatchet forgot that and so he died. Everyone in the Families understood that as soon as he or she saw what Hatchet had done. That he would do anything, sink as low as he must, if that meant his Metropolis dream could continue.”

  “Yeasay,” Shibo said.

  He went on. “The Mantis made a mistake, showing everybody what Hatchet had done. I asked it that because it thought that would somehow move us. Make us do what it wanted. Make Metropolis into a zoo. But instead it united us.”

  Killeen said this slowly, carefully. Cermo had to understand it because Cermo had to tell the others, to speak for Killeen when voices rose in opposition behind his back. As they always would.

  There was much he wanted to tell Cermo and Shibo and the others but could not yet, in the confusion of so much newness.

  “We got it,” Shibo said. “Mantis gone.”

  Killeen gave her a wan smile. “Maybe. Prob’ly not, though.”

  “But I burned it.”

  “Mantis, it’s spread out some way. You blew it away so fast maybe it didn’t get all itself moved, sent other places on Snowglade. Some got away, though. That’s what it did times before, when we thought we killed it. Maybe nothin’ can kill it.”

  Shibo said, “Next time—”

  “Hope there’s no next time,” Killeen said fervently. He loved Shibo and didn’t ever want to subject her to a risk like the one they had just run. “We were lucky. Damn lucky.”

  And in destroying the Mantis they risked Metropolis, as well. If the Mantis did not reassemble itself quickly, Marauders might find and attack the humans left behind.

  There was no way around that fact. It was the price of their freedom and they would have to live with it.

  To Killeen’s surprise Arthur broke in, his small precise voice seemingly unchanged from the time when he had been possessed by the Mantis.

  Hormones are great weavers of illusions. That was most clever, using the natural response of yourself and her to mask your speech. Little problems, indeed. Quite probably the Mantis could not penetrate it to understand what you meant. Still, I do feel you could perhaps have negotiated with it a more safe resolution of—

  Killeen cut off the Aspect with a gruff grunt. Shibo lifted an eyebrow at him, as if suspecting what went on. He grinned.

  Cermo-the-Slow asked about some details and Killeen answered with only part of his mind. He was tired but he did not want to rest. There was so much to understand and so few clues. He would have to listen to his Aspects more than ever, but always on guard against their incursions, their willfulness.

  He wondered idly if the Mantis had such problems. What was an anthology intelligence? Wasn’t Killeen, with his Aspects and Faces and own self-doubts, a collection of minds? As he grew older, parts of himself came into view like fresh landscape.

  That was what the Mantis missed. Mech civilization was beyond humanity’s grasp in many ways, but of one thing Killeen was sure. The machines lived forever in some sense, their myriad selves gathered up and reprocessed in some collective mind. The impulse to do that must have come long ago from the same despair that afflicted humans—the sure knowledge of a personal, final end.

  So the mechs had made immortality their greatest aim. Renegades who wanted to preserve all their minds were condemned. Somehow, mech civilization had decided that only a fraction of a single consciousness was worth saving. So it promised a salvation of sorts. Killeen had listened to the rantings of his own Nialdi Aspect and knew that the idea of some God-granted life was a powerful drive. Humans had believed that, too. Mechs had made it real. They had sought and found a way out of the
crush of matter and time. Their world was one of perpetual obedience to a single order, because to disobey meant true oblivion.

  And that was where the Mantis had missed the essence of the thing. Killeen knew this in a way he could not express, any more than he could say out loud what he felt when he put his arm around the shoulder of his son. But he knew it all the same.

  Death’s sure and steady measure was not pure evil. It brought an intense poignant richness to every moment. To mortal men each day came once and forever and struck sure into the heart. The machines would never know that. They lived in a kind of still gray death, where no one moment meant anything, because all moments were alike.

  Only the dreaming vertebrates knew that life held more than that.

  Which was why the Argo voyaged up. They moved across dark vaults beneath shimmering stars, the great sky river, perhaps to some tranquil end and perhaps equally to final black oblivion. But outward. Outwanrd.

  * * *

  He was passing down a corridor on the way to see to some trouble when Cermo-the-Slow and three Rooks stopped him to ask about still another problem. There had been no time to call a meeting of Families, a Witnessing of all the events which had befallen them so quickly, a time to sort it all out. But when they had all settled on a solution to the problem Cermo grinned and said, “Yeasay, Cap’n.”

  The four of them matter-of-factly departed. Killeen stood looking after them blankly This was a ship and she was under his helm. But he had not fully thought of the fact that this was the first time in a long drumroll of centuries when the conditions of the title were again met. Killeen blinked and even mouthed the word out loud. Then, slowly, he nodded.

  Timeline of Galactic Series

  2019A.D. Nigel Walmsley encounters the Snark, a mechanical scout.

  2024 Ancient alien starship found wrecked in Marginis crater, on Earth’s moon.

  2041 First signal received at Earth from Ra.

  2049 First near-light-speed interstellar probes.

  2060 Modified asteroid ships launched, using star-ship technology extracted from Marginis wreck.

  2064 Lancer starship launched with Nigel Walmsley aboard.

  2066 Discovery of machine intelligence Watchers.

  2067 First robotic starship explorations. Swarmers and Skimmers arrive at Earth.

  2076 Lancer arrives at Ra. Discovery of the “microwave-sighted” Natural society.

  2077 Lancer departs Ra.

  2081 Mechanicals trigger nuclear war on Earth.

  2085 Starship Lancer destroyed at Pocks. Watcher ship successfully attacked, with heavy human losses.

  2086 Nigel Walmsley and others escape in Watcher ship, toward Galactic Center. Humans launch robot starship vessels to take mechanical technology to Earth.

  2088 Humans contain Swarmer-Skimmer invasion. Alliance with Skimmers.

  2095 Heavy human losses in taking of orbital Watcher ships. Annihilation of Watcher fleet. No mechanical technology captured due to suicide protocols among Watchers.

  2097 Second unsuspected generation of Swarmers emerges.

  2098 First in-flight message received from Walmsley expedition: “We’re still here. Are you there?”

  2111 Final clearing of Earth’s oceans.

  2128 Robot vessels from Pocks arrive at Earth carrying mechanical technology. Immediate use by recovering human industries.

  2175 Second mechanical-directed invasion of Earth, using targeted cometary nuclei from Oort cloud. Rebuilding of human civilization.

  2302 Third mechanical-directed invasion of Earth. The Aquila Gambit begins successive novas in near-Earth stars. Beginning of Ferret Time.

  2368 First mechanical attempt to make Sun go nova. Failure melts poles of Earth.

  2383 Second nova attempt. Continents severely damaged.

  2427 Fourth mechanical-directed invasion of Earth. Rebuilding of human civilization.

  2593 Fifth mechanical-directed invasion of Earth. Diplomatic ploy thwarted.

  2763 Fifty-seventh Walmsley message received: “Are you there?”

  3264 First expedition launched toward Galactic Center from Earth.

  4455 First appearance of fourth chimpanzee species; clear divergence from host, Homo sapiens, the third species.

  FLIGHT OF HUMAN FLEET TO GALACTIC CENTER “THE BIG JUMP”

  29,059 Formation of added geometries to Wedge space-time around the central black hole. Old One manipulation of local Galactic Center space-time, apparently in anticipation of further mechanical-Natural violence. Mechanical forms carry out first incursions into Old One structures.

  29,674 Walmsley group arrives at Galactic Center in Watcher craft.

  29,683 First human entry into Wedge. Some communication with Old Ones.

  29,721 Arrival of Earth fleet expedition at Galactic Center.

  29,724 Meeting of Earth expedition and Walmsley group.

  30,000-34,547 The “Great Times” of human development. Unsuccessful search for Galactic Library. Successive conflicts with mechanicals. Development of higher layers of mechanical “sheet intelligences.” Philosophical conflicts within mechanical civilizations. Formation of mechanical artistic philosophy.

  34,547-35,792 Chandelier Age. Humans protect themselves against rising mechanical incursions. Participation of earlier humans from the Walmsley expedition. Some collaboration with Cyber organic/mechanical forms. Discovery of Galactic Library in the Wedge.

  35,792-37,463 The “Hunker Down.” Exodus from the Chandeliers to many planets within 80 light-years of Absolute Center. Includes High Arcology Era, Late Arcology Era, and High Citadel Age as human societies contract under Darwinnowing effects of mechanical competition.

  37,498 Fall of Family Bishop Citadel on Snowglade, termed the “Calamity.”

  37,504 Escape of Family Bishop from Snowglade in ancient human vessel. Clandestine oversight of this band by Mantis level mechanicals.

  37,509 Surviving Bishops reach nearest star, encounter Cybers. Defeat local mechanicals. Adopt some human refugees.

  37,510 Bishops reach Absolute Center, center Wedge.

  37,518 Temporal sequences become stochastically ordered. Release of Trigger Codes into mechanical minds. Death of most mechanical forms. Intervention of Highers to rectify damage done by excessive mechanical expansion.

  * * *

  Preservation of several human varieties. Archiving of early forms in several deeply embedded representations.

  Beginning of cooperation between Higher mechanically-based forms and organic (“Natural”) forms. Decision to address the larger problems of all lifeforms by Syntony, in collaboration with aspects of lower forms.

  Beginning of mature phase of self-organized forms.

  END OF PREAMBLE.

  LATER EVENTS CANNOT BE

  THUS REPRESENTED.

  About the Author

  GREGORY BENFORD is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, was a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, and in 1995 received the Lord Prize for contributions to science. His research encompasses both theory and experiments in the fields of astrophysics and plasma physics. His fiction has won many awards, including two Nebula Awards, one John W. Campbell Award, and one British SF Award. Dr. Benford makes his home in Laguna Beach, California.

  Gregory Benford is an eminent physicist, multiple award-winning author, and recipient of the United Nations Prize for Literature. Now in a new, revised edition, here is the continuing story of his classic Galactic Center series, a triumph of breathtaking imagination and tense human drama set against an immeasurable tapestry of space, time, and evolution.

  GREAT SKY RIVER

  Nearly 100,000 years after first contact with the machines that dominate the universe, only a few hundred humans survive. Trapped on Snowglade, a barren world near the center of the galaxy, Killeen and his child Toby of the Bishop Tribe are primitive scavengers, homeless and hunted by the ruling “mechs.” Then suddenly, a strange cosmic entity—neither o
rganic nor cybernetic nor living matter—reaches out from a black hole to speak with Killeen. But can the fallen descendant of starfarers understand this alien being in time—and seize his only chance to save his family and mankind from final annihilation?

  “Overwhelming power…irresistible strength.”

  —WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD

  “Hard science fiction at its very best.”

  —ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

  DON’T MISS BOOK 4 OF THE GALACTIC CENTER SERIES, TIDES OF LIGHT